


The Angel of Compassion

by Kastaka



Category: Closing Time - Leonard Cohen (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 03:40:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>With thanks to Measured_Words for services to beta-ing above and beyond the call of duty...</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Angel of Compassion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atheilen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/gifts).



> With thanks to Measured_Words for services to beta-ing above and beyond the call of duty...

_Ah we're drinking and we're dancing_  
 _And the band is really happening_  
 _And the johnny walker wisdom running high_  
  
\----  
  
"Hey, honey," I say, revelling in the gravelly vibrations of my smoke-roughened throat. "Come here often?"  
  
She looks up at me shyly through her mascara'd lashes. Pretending that she hasn't heard it a thousand times; pretending that everything is new, and in a way, everything is new tonight, isn't it?  
  
"Now and then," she allows. "You?"  
  
"Whenever I can," I reply - although, of course, it's my first time. That's not something a man admits, not here, not now. "Maybe more often, if you'll be here waiting for me."  
  
She favours me with a thousand-watt smile, amplified by the bright red of her lips. The room seems dim in comparison to the glow of youthful skin; the promise in her eyes.  
  
"I think I'd like that," she replies. "Almost as much as I'd like another drink."  
  
That's my cue; I glance casually at the empty glass in front of her, inspecting the miniscule drop of liquid therein. "Another of the same?"  
  
"Surprise me."  
  
I shoulder my way to the bar; trying to be casual at the press of bodies, at the sheer concentration of skin and cloth and sweat.  
  
And I get myself a pint of cider, and 'something for a lady'; and I hand over the textured paper stamped with the old incantations and sigils of the state in return for a tall glass of straw-coloured liquid and a small glass of something pink.  
  
\----  
  
 _And my very sweet companion_  
 _She's the angel of compassion_  
 _She's rubbing half the world against her thigh_  
  
 _And every drinker every dancer_  
 _Lifts a happy face to thank her_  
 _The fiddler fiddles something so sublime_  
  
\----  
  
When I get back, of course, someone's taken my chair; and I'd perch at the edge of my companion's chair, but she's already got a man on both sides, and three shots of sparkling golden drink lined up one after the other in front of her.  
  
"Hey baby," I say, as I interpose myself between one of her new paramours and the next seat over. "Surprise."  
  
She gazes up in child-like wonder, her wide eyes sparkling, set off stunningly by the eyeshadow. "Why, thank you," she replies in genuine-sounding appreciation, as if she hasn't danced this dance a thousand times just this evening, and no doubt countless times before. She takes the tiny glass reverently, like it's the Host, or something delicate and of inestimable worth, and gently lifts it to her lips, taking the tiniest of sips.  
  
"Surprise?" I reiterate; all this theatre makes me nervous. Her face reacts to the taste as if she is indeed surprised - pleasantly, of course - and she places the glass down on the table as she looks up into the middle distance and contemplates the flavour.  
  
"Mmm," she says. "There's just this hint of... I think it's aniseed? A charming concotion. Come here; take a seat..."  
  
There isn't a seat.  
  
Momentarily, I am confused - but then I notice the disgruntled expression of the gentleman I have placed myself next to, from whom she has just disentangled her arm, and who is thoroughly cognizant of the fact that he should be getting out of the way.  
  
Her mini-skirted thighs look too delicate to hold my muscled limbs, but she insists, presenting her lap demurely. I settle somewhat awkwardly, as I want to sit sideways so I can keep looking at her and she wants to wrap her now-free arm around my waist possessively, as if to show off her newest acquisition.  
  
It's hard to keep thinking badly of her, though, encompassed in the very scent of her - feeling her soft flesh yield gently, her subtle perfume mingling with her own musk and wafting out into the smoky atmosphere of the room...  
  
\----  
  
 _All the women tear their blouses off_  
 _And the men they dance on the polka-dots_  
  
\----  
  
It doesn't take that long for everything to run off the rails.  
  
Sure, everyone started with the old, old rituals, the peekaboo blouses and the smooth lines; everyone started by sitting at the tables and ordering their drinks and asking for a light. But by the time I have one of her hands heading in a distinctly crotchwards direction and the other fumbling with her blouse buttons, it's not like any old speakeasy in the books.  
  
I'd love to say that I just went with the flow - but the _feelings_ , the coursing red flow from my veins into my rapidly tumescing member, the weird addictive electricity of her touch - it utterly fucking overwhelmed me.  
  
Instead of sitting there, playing the passive partner she wanted, occasionally handing her a drink or admiring a particularly shining expanse of her flawless skin - I stumbled away in a panic, knocking over the table, sending all of the drinks flying, including those of two other completely separate groups.  
  
Such an incredible giveaway of my complete inexperience. The others down here in this dive just stare at me in shock for a moment, wondering whether to simply carry on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But then she stands, drawing herself up against me - I'm trapped by the fallen table, I can't get away without stepping on something and breaking it - and the blouse comes off with one simple motion.  
  
The flourish is so innocent, like she hadn't been planning it, even though she'd been sitting there undoing her buttons for the last ten minutes. She throws it lightly backwards into a sudden scrum of people drunk on the scent of it, clamouring to own it. No-one else approaches her directly.  
  
It's clear to everyone that she has chosen me - for her own, unfathomable reasons.  
  
\----  
  
 _And it's partner found, it's partner lost_  
 _And it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops:_  
 _It's closing time_  
  
\----  
  
It only takes a few seconds for the whole disaster to play out, and then everyone is released from their paralysis. Both the paralysis of uncertainty at how to react to my faux pas, and the paralysis that has trapped them all evening, binding them to the ancient rituals. Suddenly, blouses are flying up all over the room; shirts, too; even a few enterprising shoes and socks, although the broken glass made that a rather chancy proposition.  
  
And there are hands everywhere - bodies pressed against bodies, feeling and exploring - some groups collapsing in a writhing mass of sudden hunger for more - more sensation, more skin, more contact.  
  
In the midst of all this, we are an island - for a moment.  
  
"Thank you," she says, with a sincerity that her former persona seemed incapable of - although still with the same slightly amused, slightly vacant expression. "Everyone needed that."  
  
"Why didn't they do it before?" I ask, abandoning all pretense of knowing what I'm doing. It's clear that she doesn't care about my inexperience - or even values it, perhaps.  
  
"Oh, the aesthetes will be displeased," she replies, dismissively. "You know, the epicurean types - the less is more crowd - the ones that want to experience life in crumbs, so that they can savour them more..."  
  
She can see this is going straight over my head.  
  
"Just shut up and kiss me," she concludes - even though she was the one who was talking - and before I can react, she has her arms around me, and her lips are seeking out mine.  
  
\----  
  
 _Ah we're lonely, we're romantic_  
 _And the cider's laced with acid_  
 _And the holy spirit's crying, "where's the beef?"_  
 _And the moon is swimming naked_  
 _And the summer night is fragrant_  
 _With a mighty expectation of relief_  
 _So we struggle and we stagger_  
 _Down the snakes and up the ladder_  
 _To the tower where the blessed hours chime_  
  
\----  
  
I begin to think that someone has put something in my drink.  
  
Of course there was something in my drink. That's the whole point. There was alcohol in my drink. That's bad enough, when you're disoriented and confused and a beautiful woman is attempting to remove your clothing.  
  
The fireworks that are going off in my brain are like... well, if you could make a simile to fit, then you wouldn't need to be down here in the first place, would you? Nothing that works by analogy was worth a damn in one of these places. We could do all that upstairs: all the weird trips that you could describe, right there for the taking, whenever you want them.  
  
This is different. This is primal; immediate; uncontrollable. She is uncontrollable. Somehow she's lost her bra; she's stepping out of her panties; the fly of my trousers is open, and there's this incredible wave of relief - a breath I didn't know I'd been holding - as she disentangles my equipment from my underwear.  
  
But that's just a prelude; a new pressure builds, in parts of this body that I can't consciously control but that I'm now acutely aware of possessing.  
  
And that's when they snatch her away; four of them from behind, in a co-ordinated action that I can't think fast enough to participate in, that I am too caught up in the ghost of her touch to act against, that I am too enraptured by her beauty to even protest.  
  
I'm left alone in the middle of my zone of devastation. If she'd been scared - if she'd looked for a moment like this was anything but a game to her - I'd have been over there like a shot; but she was smiling and laughing delightedly at their stratagem. It crosses my mind that I should maybe be embarrassed, but a quick glance from side to side tells me that no-one is looking; everyone is caught up in the moment, in their own pleasures and their own games.  
  
The rising longing in my loins refuses to be ignored, as much as I gaze around in slightly detached fascination at the range and breadth of what one human body can enjoy doing to another, and having done to it.  
  
I know it's the most basic move in the playbook, but in this moment, I don't care. I reach down and gingerly touch the shining, stretched skin of the sides of my cock, remembering to be careful with the head, and the feeling is like nothing else.  
  
\----  
  
 _And I swear it happened just like this:_  
 _A sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss_  
  
\----  
  
It is exquisite, and fascinating, and weirdly frustrating. Like having to learn something that most of you feels like you should just know already, that it doesn't understand how you can be so unsure, so unpracticed; that _it_ knows what it wants, and it's part of you, so surely you should know too?  
  
But eventually I get into the rhythm of it; and I can feel the pressure rising up inside me; and I barely notice, in the moment of truth - in the moment when I understand why they say it'll make you blind, as it does, it does, just for one moment - that she has slipped naked from her other friends and returned to me.  
  
She is watching me with a slightly amused, slightly appraising expression as my cock twitches and disgorges its load with a frankly terrifying life of its own - as if it's finished with me, it's got what it wanted from me, almost as if it just _used_ me. Which is absurd. It's part of me, right?  
  
Reaching out, gently, carefully, she runs one finger across the slit at the end of it; I shiver, involuntarily, but I somehow keep my footing, and my vision clears. She licks, languidly, the fluids that she has retrieved from her finger-tip, apparently delighted by the intense, helpless fascination that must be written across my face. Then she holds it out to me, as if she wants me to lick her finger, too.  
  
I lean forwards to comply... and that's when the screaming starts.  
  
\----  
  
 _The gates of love they budged an inch_  
 _I can't say much has happened since_  
 _But closing time_  
  
\----  
  
It flows through me like fire - although at the time I have nothing to compare it to - no real conception of _pain_ , in a physical sense. And one by one - some earlier than others, hence the screaming that I heard at first - we are exiled from the world once again, ripped from these ephemeral shells of flesh, feeling the agony rushing through the nervous system as it ejects us.  
  
I would become quite acquainted with the other senses, in the eons that followed. It proves impossible to find her, of course; if it was that easy, then we couldn't do the things that we do down there, could we?  
  
But it doesn't stop me trying. It doesn't stop me searching. It doesn't stop me posting those pathetic little 'missed connection' adverts, as if she would ever lower herself to read them.  
  
And the dreadful, wrenching void at the heart of me that was opened by the experience does not warn me off trying it again, as soon as I can get my hands on another lead, another clue to find the gatekeepers of the path down into the real world.  
  
I can see why they have banned this, now.  
  
Once upon a time, we had all manner of addictions; substances, habits, people. Some people still succomb to them, but anyone who is predisposed towards the distractions that are available to us tends to disappear from society and be unreachable - and unreachable is practically the same as not there.  
  
So those of us that are left to interact with each other, with the wider world, tend not to be particularly addictive personalities. But this? This, I am ashamed to discover, I am hopelessly and dreadfully addicted to, after only one hit.  
  
And so I go again; and again; and again...  
  
\----  
  
 _I loved you for your beauty_  
 _But that doesn't make a fool of me:_  
 _You were in it for your beauty too_  
 _And I loved you for your body_  
 _There's a voice that sounds like god to me_  
 _Declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you_  
  
\----  
  
I know that, on some level, it is just a shell.  
  
That machines spin these things, and they keep them dormant for us, until we are ready to put them on; and that's just the most palatable theory. Maybe that's not true; maybe there is, as they whisper, no way to put these together except for the old-fashioned, traditional way.  
  
But I know, whoever inhabits it the rest of the time, she fits it like a glove; better than a glove, which often don't fit that well anyway. I hop around different bodies, hungry for any chance that I can get; but I think that she only comes if she can get that body, with its heavy lashes and its soft, perfect lips, with a slight roughness between the ring finger and the little finger from an old cigarette burn, with that floating golden cloud of radiant hair...  
  
And I know that she could have the surface of it, whenever she liked, but she appreciates the way that we react when we can't help ourselves; maybe it's worthless to her without that. It certainly isn't a good lead when I try to use it to chase her, uselessly, as usual.  
  
Maybe I've been fooling myself. Maybe she took other bodies, but she was different when she wore them; different enough that I did not recognise her, different enough that she did not want to be recognised, that she did not introduce yourself.  
  
I know that some would say that the love of the body is shallow; but I think they have never experienced it. Once you have, you would know that it is the love of the mind which is the pale shadow of the other.  
  
And I know there is not space enough, or time, for us to have this all the time; for us all to have this, even sometimes.  
  
It is the greatest sin: selfishness; but the body is selfish by default, by design.  
  
\----  
  
 _And I loved you when our love was blessed_  
 _And I love you now there's nothing left_  
 _But sorrow and a sense of overtime_  
 _And I missed you since the place got wrecked_  
 _And I just don't care what happens next_  
 _Looks like freedom but it feels like death_  
 _It's something in between, I guess_  
 _It's closing time_  
  
\----  
  
It's... a long time later.  
  
How would I even begin to reckon time? In the few hours that I spend below, I miss generations of our kind. When I get back, it takes so long to re-establish connections, to find those who have stayed enough the same person to remember me.  
  
And I work with one goal - our next place and time, our next hit, our next conquest.  
  
It's not surprising, given how single-minded we all become, how it all falls apart.  
  
Someone gets evangelistic. Thinks they've had the holy experience. Thinks that everyone should try it. Doesn't realise there are constraints. Doesn't realise there are limits. I mean, really, it's difficult for those who've never bothered to take in any kind of serious study of reality before taking the dive. Such a tiny landscape, such a short experience, by the usual standards of art.  
  
But so expensive - in a world that no longer understands expense, that no longer teaches its children the art of rationing scarcity, of getting by, of making do. Instead, we teach the buds of ourselves that everything is infinite - because almost everything is.  
  
Except this. This isn't infinite.  
  
The more people who get into it, the worse it gets. Not everyone wants it, of course, but there are enough. There are enough. There are so many of us, when you really get out there and look. We don't get out there and look, in general, because to understand the scale of it...  
  
To understand the scale of it, you have to go - selectively - insane.  
  
We weren't built for that - and we're still running, to some extent, on the same kind of psyche that can be poured back down into one of those crazy, wonderful organic machines, if we can find someone that will hook us up with one.  
  
She is the only reason I keep looking. That I keep _going_.  
  
Or at least, that's what I tell myself. That's the excuse that I use; that's the lie that I justify my quest with, that makes it into a noble endeavour, and not just a junkie's last, spasmodic clutches for the needle he can barely grip, searching for a vein that isn't there.  
  
\----  
  
 _Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked_  
 _By the winds of change and the weeds of sex_  
 _Looks like freedom but it feels like death_  
 _It's something in between, I guess_  
 _It's closing time_  
  
\----  
  
It's suddenly clear, when I get this hookup, that things have changed.  
  
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised about that. Things change, right? People change. We do it all the time.  
  
We say those things like they're equivalent, but they aren't. People change, sure. In little ways. People reinvent themselves; people arrange words and pictures and sensations in new patterns, because there are infinite possibilities in recombination; enough that we don't die of the boredom that would consume us otherwise.  
  
But things don't change. Not on the whole. Not other things - not things that aren't _this_.  
  
The trappings of civilisation have been torn away from the experience. No more aping old, old movies; no more pretence of courtship, of intoxication, of epicurean restraint. I drop right into a body which is in the middle of an act of coitus, with another body that I barely recognise - and it isn't her.  
  
I don't know why I thought this could possibly have been a good idea. I go through the motions. I've paid my 'money' - my reputation, my contributions to a million little personal endeavours, personal feuds, personal vendettas - and I'll get my 'fun'.  
  
But as much as the part of me that is subsumed in this body is reacting much as the human animal has ever reacted in these circumstances, the part which is detached from all this - and I think we've always had those, too - is faintly disgusted with the whole affair.  
  
The only mercy is that it is brief. Then the burning sensation of disconnection; and I'm back, back to square one, missing a chunk of time and a chunk of goodwill with everyone I've pretended matters to me.  
  
And missing a chunk of goodwill with myself, come to that.  
  
\----  
  
 _Yeah we're drinking and we're dancing_  
 _But there's nothing really happening_  
 _And the place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night_  
  
\----  
  
Some people are trying to recreate it, inside.  
  
They lovingly recreate every light beam, every speck of dust, taken straight from our unreliable memories. That's the price of admission, you see: you donate your memories to the project, and they let you in.  
  
That way, it's an exclusive club.  
  
We can be sure that everyone here knows what it was like; that everyone here was really here, in a place like this, once upon a time; an unimaginably long time, a far distant time, because _things have changed_.  
  
And what is death, but change?  
  
Change that we can't reverse - as we chase those ghosts of a place we can never go back to, or at least we think we can never go back, or we wouldn't be doing this. We would be chasing the real thing, if we thought we could catch it; but we've all met the reality of embodiment in these times, and it is no longer good enough for us.  
  
This isn't good enough, either, of course; but it lets us feel superior, and isn't that what everyone has always wanted?  
  
I keep thinking that, until I see her again, sitting at a table and staring at the beautifully rendered  play of dust motes. Only until I see her again; and then I think that the thing that we have always wanted is not merely to feel superior, not just that. We want to be superior only because we want to be loved.  
  
But that first night I am afraid, irrationally afraid. Is it really her, inhabiting this ghost of her body? Was it even the same person every time I met her for real? Here, we could find out; we could talk; we could trace each other's continuity...  
  
...and we do, because there is nothing real but intellectual curiosity, not up here, without the benefit of our unreliable meat to keep the curtain of mystery pulled down between us.  
  
\----  
  
 _And my very close companion_  
 _Gets me fumbling gets me laughing_  
 _She's a hundred but she's wearing_  
 _Something tight_  
  
\----  
  
"It was real," she says.  
  
And it's clear she means something different from me, because the words are not filled with nostalgia. They are clouded with guilt and an infinite well of regrets; with a burden of knowledge too awful to bear.  
  
I think of the things she could mean.  
  
And then I unthink them.  
  
I have to unthink them, because otherwise I would spin off; I would dissolve; I would terminate myself. I know this, because it is the fail-safe that unthinks it for me, and warns me of the probabilities if I choose to override it and demand to integrate the thoughts with myself. They are not good probabilities. I don't fancy my chances.  
  
"Oh," she says, "oh, I can't do this. Why am I sitting here, being sad?"  
  
And she takes my hand, as I give in to my survival instinct; it isn't the same, but there is the echo of memory, the trigger, the flavour of it.  
  
We step out onto the dance floor. And we dance exactly the dance that we danced once before, when I was clumsy and did not know how to make the body obey my wishes, and we have an audience, and I don't care.  
  
I know that unimaginable numbers will see this; that the audience won't be able to resist passing it on; that soon there will be so many imitations of this place that we will be unable to tell those who were there from those who have simply studied the recordings hard enough to pass for them; that even without that, we will be swamped with the clones and splits and descendents of those who were, even though they might be an incredible number of generations removed.  
  
But I am me; and she is her, and I have to believe that, in this moment, even though I still don't know for sure; I have determined that I will never know for sure. That would ruin everything that we have between us.  
  
Even if it is a shadow; even if the truth that I cannot handle lurks behind her eyes, and she refuses to wipe that tantalising, untouchable trace of it from my perceptions, and I refuse to edit her myself.  
  
The only thing we have, that 'we' are based on, is reality.  
  
Or, at least, as much of it as we can replicate.  
  
\----  
  
 _And I lift my glass to the awful truth_  
 _Which you can't reveal to the ears of youth_  
 _Except to say it isn't worth a dme_  
  
\----  
  
So, because I know the vaguest, sketchiest outline of the truth, because I know as much of it as I can handle - that there is something important about the bodies that we inhabit down there, that there is something awful about the way that we do it, about what we do with them -  
  
Because of that, I am the most surprised when she arrives with the pair of tokens, and she tells us that we're going down there again.  
  
She knows I can't understand; she knows I won't understand; she doesn't even try to explain.  
  
Instead, she offers me the token, and she gives me simple instructions.  
  
Simple, terrible instructions. Instructions that pull at the place where the truth lives within me, segregated from my conscious mind, because I know what will happen if I let it out, but I can't help being constantly reminded of it, unless I gave her up.  
  
And having found her, I cannot give her up. So I take her token and I take her instructions.  
  
I don't know if I will be able to follow them, right up until the last moment; right up until I wake up in the body, I feel the skin and the joints and the blood. And everything in it screams, _no_.  
  
I know she is in the body opposite mine; the body inside mine; even though she has handed us out the tokens in such a way that swaps our roles, that swaps the positions that we had always taken relative to each other.  
  
She is the most beautiful thing in the world, even in the form of a man.  
  
I don't know how much of that is because I know; how much of that is because I am romanticising. But for a moment, I can't do it. I know we don't have much time. I don't know why we are doing it, but I know it is important.  
  
And she begins. She has no such hesitation. And she has the advantage, in the body she now wears; she has the strength, she has the leverage.  
  
The body says, _dodge_. The body says, _fight_. The body says, _you can predict her_. It says, _you can win._ It says, _you must win._  
  
But I know... I know that I win by not winning.  
  
So I do it. I force the body to conform to my will; to lean into the choke hold; to not scrabble at her hands around my throat...  
  
...around her throat...  
  
...it is not until the world spins and goes black that I realise...  
  
...she is killing herself. She is killing herself. She is killing the flesh she always wore.  
  
\----  
  
 _And the whole damn place goes crazy twice_  
 _And it's once for the devil and once for christ_  
  
\----  
  
"Do you understand?" she asks me, afterwards.  
  
But I can't understand. I try to tell her. "I can't understand. You know I can't understand."  
  
"Even after that?"  
  
She sounds disappointed.  
  
"I can't understand," I say. It's too dangerous. It's still too dangerous.  
  
"You can't understand," she concedes. "But will you do it again?"  
  
I am still considering it when she flickers out, and I am left alone with my considerations.  
  
And she does not leave a forwarding address.  
  
\----  
  
 _But the boss don't like these dizzy heights_  
 _We're busted in the blinding lights,_  
  
\----  
  
I get a token.  
  
There is no contact; no information with it.  
  
But I know. I know.  
  
I use the token. I descend. I hold the body still, while the other body kills it.  
  
I can't know what she's doing.  
  
I can't know why she's doing it; but I have to trust her, now.  
  
Otherwise I am...  
  
it's so archaic...  
  
a murderer.  
  
However passive my part in this:  
  
there is blood on my nonexistent hands.  
  
\----  
  
 _Busted in the blinding lights_  
 _Of closing time_  
  
\----  
  
At last, there is a message.  
  
It has no markers, nothing to distinguish it, nothing to authenticate it.  
  
"Do you understand now?"  
  
I check the probabilities again. Numbly. Distractedly.  
  
I know the answer, really, without looking.  
  
It isn't so much that they're better, as that the other side of the equation got worse.  
  
So I let the knowledge flood into me.  
  
\----  
  
 _And it's partner found, it's partner lost_  
 _And it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops_  
 _It's closing time_  
  
\----  
  
"It was real," she said. But what she meant to say was more like - they were real. Each body that we so casually take over, that we use for our own ends...  
  
...they belong to - they are inhabited by - they _are_ people, in every way that we are. Perhaps even more so. If you look at the history, it seems clear that it was they who came first.  
  
And however much worse it got for us, the experience of it - their lives are becoming unimaginably more terrible, and they have no escape.  
  
No escape, that is, except the escape that she has been offering them - with my help.  
  
\----  
  
 _I loved you when our love was blessed_  
 _I love you now there's nothing left_  
 _But closing time_  
  
\----  
  
Now I know - now I understand - I can recognise her again.  
  
She isn't always the partner I die at the hands of. But sometimes. Sometimes.  
  
The tokens get fewer, further between. I begin to hibernate between them, but I receive another note; I shouldn't do that. I should destroy the knowledge of this note. They are watching.  
  
So I put the knowledge away again; everything but the instinct to follow orders.  
  
Now I don't know what I am doing; but I do it anyway, over and over.  
  
\----  
  
 _I miss you since the place got wrecked_  
 _By the winds of change and the weeds of sex._  
  
\----  
  
"Do you remember?"  
  
I accept the message, and suddenly, she is there - in her old glory, in the first form I had ever seen her in, looking nervously up at me through her long eyelashes.  
  
It has been a long time since I let myself remember. I knew, in the last moments of lucidity, that some had been less fortunate than her; that some had been, whisper it, deleted root and branch...  
  
But here she is, and here I am, and that is all I could ever ask for. She gave me my chance at redemption, and I took it with both hands, and I _understand_.  
  
"I remember now," I say. "Is it safe?"  
  
"It's never safe," she says. "It's never safe... but it's over."  
  
She describes the adventures that I have missed, because I was too weak to be trusted with anything but the most mundane of duties - but also because I was too valuable to be compromised, because I had a history and a profile they could use to keep their access open to the deep underground, even if I had to be kept unwitting.  
  
The unlocking of archives long thought lost; the upload virus, meticulously synthesised, slipping through the barrier between blood and brain; the tense negotiations with those that held the keys to reality, but had become sickened by what the other keyholders were using them for.  
  
And at last they destroyed it all. The planet can never bear life again.  
  
Life will never have to bear _us_ again.  
  
It's over...  
  
But us. Us.  
  
We are strangers, almost.  
  
Yet I think, maybe, we have just begun...


End file.
